Scrum Gathering Brazil 2009

Last week a great event took place in São Paulo, Brasil, where a lot of Scrum enthusiasts gathered to discuss and learn more about Scrum.

I’m talking about the “Scrum Gathering Brazil 2009”. The event happened in the luxurious Grand Hyatt on the last 12th and the 13th (May-2009). It was very well organized by the Scrum Alliance folks and the local guys from Adaptworks.

From that event I had the opportunity to learn a lot about the experience others are having with the use of Scrum in Brasil and hopefully gained some insight from it.

One of the first decisions that came out of this event is that I really need to go back to writing about Scrum and get into the discussions that are going on. My blog about Scrum is back, and I hope, here to stay. As a suggestion from my colleagues here in Concrete Solutions, the posts will be now preferably in English to better enjoy the riches of a possibly international discussion.

In this post I’ll share my overall view of the event, and maybe this will get things going.

As I’ve stated, I think the event was very well organized. Participation however, was not very heterogeneous in my opinion. Few customers attended. The event looked like a meeting about Scrum for Scrum enthusiasts in Brasil, as a mean to get them together.

The gathering had a lot of people from the academic Brasil, lots of students, people from companies that are early adopters of Scrum (such as globo.com and Petrobrás) and some service providers (such as Adaptworks and CI&T).

The presentations, in general, assumed you already knew Scrum to some extent, so, in this sense, it was in accord with the attendance. As a whole the presentations were not very rich in details, and some were really, and explicitly a starting point for discussion. My opinion is that little insight came from the presentations themselves, but a lot from discussions after them.

People seemed to be genuinely excited and willing to enter honest discussions. Everyone seemed really interested in the opinion and to learn from the others there. The discussions were not mere rhetorical confrontations. In my opinion this was the best aspect of the gathering. People seemed to be interested in improving our work condition and practices. I just hope this continues as we move forward to seeing the attendance of the actual clients.

On the next post I’ll comment specifically about the lectures I have attended and what I thought about it all.